In city after city, Ripken went through the same ritual -- until the Orioles arrived in Seattle in late August, the last road trip before he was coming home for the historic home stand. That was when the season-long celebration turned ugly. Someone identifying himself as Lou Gehrig, Jr., -- although Gehrig had no children -- called the Kingdome and threatened to shoot Ripken if he played in the August 23 game against the Mariners. This was not the first death threat Ripken had received during the year, so a security agent had been assigned to travel with Ripken the month before.

Nothing came of this new threat, and Ripken, who played all nine innings of the game, was not even told about it until after the game. His teammates learned about it from reporters the next day when the Orioles moved on to Anaheim to play the Angels. "You have to just deal with it," Ripken said. "It's something that you have to think about and take certain precautions," he noted, adding, "in the very best world, I'd like to think that I'm just a baseball player. I want to come out and play baseball and be like everybody else. But when something like this happens, you have to think about things in a little bit different way."

Ripken's outlook was typical of the man. "I'm not going to let it affect the way I'm playing," Ripken said. "I'm not going to let it inhibit the way I live my life."

The Orioles left Anaheim without any more incidents and headed home to start the nine-game home stand that would immortalize Ripken. The Orioles also headed home with a dismal 54-60 record in what had been a disappointing season. Manager Phil Regan, hand-picked by Angelos's special hiring committee, turned out to be a disaster. He lost the respect of the players early on by clashing right from the start of spring training with Ripken and other veterans. The relationship never got better, but Regan had Ripken to thank for not being fired during the season.

Baltimore had climbed back to around the .500 mark by the end of July and was showing signs of competing for a playoff spot when the roof caved in on August 1. Reliever Doug Jones blew a 10-6 lead over the Toronto Blue Jays, losing 12-10. Jones and Regan were booed so loudly that night that Angelos wanted to fire Regan right on the spot, but general manager Roland Hemond and assistant general manager Frank Robinson talked him out of it.

Less than two weeks later, the Orioles were swept in five straight games in Boston. After the final game of that series, when the team finished with a record of 46-53, Angelos considered firing Regan again. However, he determined that the attention to such a move, coming within four weeks of the Ripken record-breaking game, might detract from the attention that was about to come to the franchise because of The Streak. So Angelos figured he would ride out the season with Regan, who was fired in October. None of that seemed to matter much when the home stand leading up to the record-breaking game began, a two-week period that would forever etch Camden Yards in the hearts and minds of baseball fans everywhere.

At one time, Ripken probably believed he would be playing this game -- if he got this far -- at Memorial Stadium, where Ripken used to roam as a child, soaking up the major league atmosphere all around him when his father was an Orioles coach. This stadium was also where Ripken broke in as a rookie and played every game from May 30, 1982, until the Orioles left after the 1991 season-1,573 consecutive games.

Would Ripken rather have broken the record back at Memorial Stadium? In his fourth season at Camden Yards, did he feel at home? "When we left Memorial Stadium, I was really torn between what I represented as old Orioles history and what I really loved about baseball, and how I associated that with Memorial Stadium," Ripken said. "As a player, you know that you are playing in the same place that someone like Brooks Robinson played in, the same place where all those World Series games were played. It just made you feel like Memorial Stadium was a special place.

"I was worried that when we went to Camden Yards, we would lose that feeling," Ripken continued. "I wasn't sure how it would be. But the strangest thing happened. When we started playing in Camden Yards, it felt like a place where baseball had been played for years. It felt like home." The home of the game -- the perfect setting for what was to unfold over the next nine days.

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